City-Wide School Construction Costing and Planning System:

NYC Department of Education (DOE)

Background

Intellis has provided services as an integral software solution developer and consultant company since the project formally began in 1998.

In order to comprehensively perform costing for the annual school construction budget, the Department of Education needed a system that would allow for associating costs with building deficiencies, allow for prioritization of construction, and perform reporting features to allow them to extract necessary information. Intellis also applied industry-standard costing parameters and components to make oCPDS a success.

Challenge

Develop and implement a system that associates costs with building deficiencies, ranks prioritization of construction projects, and performs in-depth analysis reporting.

Every five years the Department of Education (DOE) completes a Five-Year Capital Plan, typically to the value of approximately $8 to $13 billion. This capital plan is based on the structural condition and needs of about 1,600 school buildings around NYC’s Five Boroughs.

In order to comprehensively perform costing for the annual school construction budget, the DOE needed a system that would allow for associating costs with building deficiencies, allow for prioritization of construction, and perform reporting features to allow them to extract necessary information.

Scope

Intellis developed the Capital Plan Development System (CPDS) and more recently developed an online version, aptly named the Online Capital Plan Development System (oCPDS).

oCPDS is used by a team of Capital Plan analysts to plan projects to respond to building deficiencies and needs for new schools. The system will also be available to the School Construction Authority (SCA) and other agencies for updating information about actual project cost.

Intellis performed the following:

Business requirements analysis in conjunction with DOE and the New York City School Construction Authority (SCA)

Creation of costing and forecasting algorithms to assess and prioritize construction needs with SCA

Creation of a comprehensive reporting structure using the FOUNDATION platform (formerly called Mobile Validity® Report Server and Filter Builder) to enable the generation of multiple targeted reports

Deployment of an inter-agency deficiency and costing system

Technology transfer and ongoing technical support

Ongoing technical maintenance and data analysis expertise

Solution & Benefits

The system developed by Intellis allows for comprehensive reports to be generated based on specific SCA requirements, and Intellis’s costing calculation software enabled report generation based on inspection deficiencies.

Deficiencies found through the inspection process (using software developed by Intellis referred to as part of the Building Condition Assessment Survey – BCAS) are costed and prioritized using the Deficiency Costing Prioritization system. This system allowed DOE and SCA to manage the extraordinary task of prioritizing the deficiencies of 1400 public schools using built-in algorithms and reporting.

oCPDS, the planning system, then uploads this information to create a range of projects based on different planning scenarios. The oCPDS system allows DOE and SCA to manage the entire set of school construction projects, of which there are more than 1,600 planned for the next five years at a cost of about $13 billion, and track the execution of these projects. The system coordinates between the two agencies, manages import and export of information as the Capital Plan moves through its lifecycle from Planning to Operating to Planning a new Plan, and feeds information to the Office of Management and Budget.

Intellis facilitated and oversaw the collection of data and integration of the data into the system. Intellis also provided all necessary technical support to ensure that the project progressed smoothly, and assisted DOE and SCA in ongoing project evaluation.